Paper short abstract:

Building on Bread and Puppet's 1984 "Why Cheap Art Manifesto," I offer an essay and facilitate a collective building of a manifesto on the role of artistic labor in today's societies, as part of the effort to articulate the value of creative labor in the imagining of alternative societal systems.

Paper long abstract:

In 1984, the political puppet theatre company Bread and Puppet published its “Why Cheap Art Manifesto.” The short document uses mixed fonts and varying text sizes that look like something from a scrapbooking crafts project. One of its core expressions is that the role of an artist is to allow others to engage in and create art. In this model, the role of the artist is not one of a producer, but of a facilitator of a public experience.

What is the manifesto for artistic work in the present-day increasingly technological environment? In this panel, I will offer a creative essay that interrogates and builds on the “Why Cheap Art Manifesto” to explore this question. I will ask fellow panel and audience members to write down, in free association, what they think should be included in a “Why Art Work Now Manifesto” and then suggest a collective gathering of a draft of such a “manifesto.”

Although famous for its political claims about the role of art in capitalism, the Bread and Puppet Manifesto offers a point of intervention in developing an understanding of artistic work in the present-day digital environment. I ask how the value of artistic work is relocated to its role in the construction of alternative social infrastructure. I build on my doctoral work and previous artistic practice to explore the ways in which scientific theories about the value of artistic work can be constructed with and through practice (such as this essay and the collective imagining exercise).